Every monthly Community Call at Agoric is an opportunity for us to talk about what we’re doing, and to answer questions we’ve been receiving from validators, partners, and others in the ecosystem. This month’s call was especially momentous, as we dove deep into a range of important topics, including BLD staking, distribution, the RUN protocol, and the Agoric roadmap.
If you weren’t among the 250+ community members who tuned into our April 6 Community Call, this post is intended as a summary of key items. And a special thanks goes out to guests Josh Swihart (ECC), Josh Lee (Keplr), and Ric Shreves (DCF).
Join us @agoric for our next Community Call on May (the) 4th at 9am PT / 4pm UTC.
Now, let’s break down the April 6 call:
Human-Readable URLs
The Agoric website has a slate of easy-to-access, easily memorized URLs for key information:
We’re hiring!
Wen?
Staking Month!
BLD Distribution from Public Sale
At the end of 2021, we did our public sale for BLD, and we’ve now updated the community on the status of that process:
48,000 individuals participated in our CoinList public sale for BLD tokens.
We’ve distributed BLD to 46,000 purchasers!
For the 2,000 addresses that couldn’t submit on time or submitted incorrect addresses, we are planning another round of address collection closer to the launch of mainnet 1. The target is May.
We are working with CoinList on longer-term integration.
Staking Month
April is the cruelest month, according to T.S. Eliot, but at Agoric we think of it as Staking Month!
We’re starting a campaign to promote staking/delegating, complete with how-to articles and governance best-practice. Get all the details at
.
Staking and governance are where BLD token holders determine what happens with the Agoric chain.
We’ll soon have more on Twitter Spaces, AMAs, fireside chats, etc.
Q: When will staking rewards be turned on? A: Delegation and staking are critical parts of making Agoric a robust, decentralized platform. Staking rewards are part and parcel of that, so we expect the community to do something about that as we get closer to launch.
Keplr Staking Infrastructure
Josh Lee, a co-founder of Chainapsis, the company that created the Keplr wallet, spoke on the Community Call. Key takeaways:
Staking is easy to do, though there is some background that you should understand.
There is direct Agoric support in Keplr, including in mobile.
Josh says he’s excited to be involved in the wallet, since it’s often the first way people interact with Agoric.
Dean, Agoric’s CEO, noted the governance button in the mobile app. This lets you look at the proposals and vote on them.
Investor Perspective
Josh Swihart of Electric Coin Company – Zcash talked from the investor’s point of view:
Electric Coin Company built and supports Zcash, a dynamically evolving cryptocurrency, most notably with strong privacy protections.
We were early investors in Agoric. We knew the work of Mark, Dean, Brian, and Bill, and they have been long-time collaborators and friends of our founder, Zooko.
From the beginning, we were excited about the promise of secure, decentralized, JavaScript-based smart contacts — and also hopeful that there would be a path for future interop with Zcash. We knew that making a bet on this team was a great bet, and so we invested.
In fact, I personally wrote a blog about our investment about 4 years ago, back in May of 2018!
Today, through our parent 501(c)3 called Bootstrap, we hold about 42.6M BLD tokens based on our initial investment. As it turns out, they may be worth something. 🙂
While we are only staking a small fraction of our tokens today, we will be doing more.
All of our work at ECC is focused on the betterment of Zcash, and we see some wonderful possibilities at the intersection of these two projects and the future of web3.
We plan to be active stakers, delegators, and participants in the community. While I don’t have more detailed information for you right now, we’re actively working through specifics. Please stay tuned. We’re excited as ever to be a part of this community.
Dean added: Zcash was our very first investor, back when we were a gleam in the eye. Zcash was a big help when I was nearly overwhelmed at the Consensus conference, my first conference in this industry.
Community Roadmap
We’ve updated our community roadmap to reflect community, development, and security efforts.
We distilled a blizzard of GitHub tickets and Discord chat to a concise roadmap to synchronize Community, Development team, and Security work. Check it out:
It begins with some of the things we discussed in the March Community Call and shows plans for the coming months.
The roadmap is not static. It will reflect updates, such as when a security review is rescheduled, etc.
RUN Protocol
RUN is designed to be the stable token backed by assets in the Cosmos / IBC ecosystem.
RUN Protocol and RUN (the token) are undergoing a rebrand. We have a bit of due diligence before we announce the new names.
Governance process for RUN Protocol:
We’ve internally laid out the sequence of governance processes that will need to happen to launch the protocol. The community roadmap puts an estimated timeline on some of these. There will be a lot more communication coming up
BLD stakers will act as governance for the protocol. We now have the ability for a Cosmos-level vote by the BLDer DAO to run JavaScript code to drive system updates
The launch of RUN Protocol via governance, instead of hard-coded bootstrap, has been implemented and tested in devnet. There is a
of this process (also linked from the Agoric newsletter that just went out on April 5th).
We’ll have a future session dedicated specifically to RUN Protocol topics and governance.
Engineering Updates
RUNStake UI has been implemented. You can lien and unlien BLD, borrow and repay RUN, and see market/account data and history.
Parity Stability Module has been implemented. This allows the direct trading of governance-approved stable currencies with RUN and will drive a tighter peg. (Dean noted that our economist pushed for this in particular.)
Initial end-to-end testing of third-party oracle aggregated price feeds. In collaboration with simply staking, a price feed provider successfully reproduced our Chainlink oracle work to trigger the submission of prices to an on-chain contract that aggregated them and produced a `priceAuthority` that can be consumed by other contracts.
Contract upgrade: we have a design, and the swingset kernel part is done well enough to run a small prototype. We are now rolling it out to the rest of our system, including the RUN protocol contracts.
Read-only only data reporting: we’re excited about progress here. This will be implemented/integrated in the next month.
We are targeting a build for the RUN Protocol to be deployed to devnet in the last week of April. This will allow economic and initial user testing of the core contracts. This testing will focus on ensuring stability mechanisms are robust in volatile market conditions and against exploits
Security Updates
In March, we had a Restival, which was a RUN protocol security review. This was designed as a “purple team” collaboration: a red team looking for bugs, plus a blue team helping them red team understand the system.
There were 21 participants, drawing from the crews at
and
, plus new Agoric staff.
Result: 42 issues of various sizes. While that number might seem big, only two are high severity. None are critical. We identified opportunities for testing, tooling, docs, etc. See the
tag on GitHub for more.
We developed several diagrams so that everybody understands the system better.
We have a third-party audit of RUN protocol planned.
We just launched an audit of the swingset kernel.
Stay tuned to the community roadmap:
!
Decentralized Cooperation Foundation (DCF)
Ric Shreves, who is heading up the new DCF, introduced the organization. DCF produces grants, bounties, and other support for the ecosystem.
Update on prelim steps: legal, financial infrastructure.
Nailing down a domain, engaging branding work. Agency retained for branding.
Setting up a treasury is pending legal and financial work.
Designing of the Staking Policy is underway. To answer a question from the community, the foundation has not done any staking yet. When we do, we’ll communicate clearly about it.
We’re looking into an initial “MVP” community governance system with RUN team.
Again, check out the full recording: https://agoric.link/Community-Call-19. And join the next @agoric Community Call on May (the) 4th at 9am PT / 4pm UTC.
